The Environmental Cost of Digital Data
Along with all the electronic waste issues associated with the information economy now there is the energy cost of running the servers and keeping them cool!
I luved all the hype over the years with space distanciation theory, and how geography is disappearing with the internet, the meat space of the planet is disapearing. In reality though, the Internet is very real and intertwined with the planet, think of all those trenches for all those cables, manholes, undersea cables, all those towers, all those hubs, switching stations, antennas and space satellites, and of course the environmental cost of trashing and maintaining and manufacturing all that stuff!
And the tagline was the computer revolution is good for the environment as it will bring us the paperless office! Ironic!
read:
Data Centers’ Growing Power Demands
A new report quantifies the electricity consumption of servers, revealing a startling trend.
By Kate Greene, MIT Technology Review
The report is:
Calculating Total Power Requirements for Data Centres by Richard Sawyer from American Power Conversion (APC).
It is also interesting to think how concentrated all that stuff is. And the what if scenarios around a natural disaster or worse. An earthquake brought down the internet in Asia for weeks just recently! Our economies and lives are so dependent on these technologies that we have barely noticed this until of course the infrastructures break down.
This post on the ecological footprint of a cheezeburger comes to mind and i wonder what the actual footprint is of downloading a google map and what the full production cycle would be. Or any other data service for that matter.
